Within the environmental domain, key drivers have been subdivided in three main factors relating to climate change, resources and pollution. The transport sector has a great variety of impacts on the environment, the vast majority being negative. Transport impacts on the environment for an intensive use of resources: among all sectors transport, together with construction, is the far biggest energy consumer. More and more disruptive events are expected to happen in the future due to increasing global warming. At the same time, the current levels of pollutants (also in terms of noise) registered in most urban areas are affecting seriously health conditions of the population.

In order to tackle these challenges, a wide bulk of actions has been initiated in order to mitigate and reduce GHG and other pollutant emissions.

From a sustainability perspective, the reduction of transport volumes and speeds would help to achieve quite remarkable results in impacts’ mitigation, but this scenario seems to be hardly sustainable from an economic point of view (GDP growth and total welfare).

So, alternative ways of addressing these environmental challenges could be to place more emphasis on technological and logistics improvement, to care for a more rational use of energy and renewable energy sources, to invest in mature and eco-friendly planning and land-use as well as to widen the scope of existing pricing schemes or measures of environmental taxation, applying them in a more extensive way.

Among these measures the latter proved to be very effective and have the great advantage to be immediately effective. Incentive schemes and eco-friendly taxation are also key determinants in achieving the targets of limits for pollutants and noise fixed by legislative measures for urban areas.